Five takeaways from the Trump Tower transcripts

May 17, 2018

The Senate Judiciary Committee released thousands of pages of interviews Wednesday conducted with many participants at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, providing the deepest look yet at the meeting where Donald Trump Jr. was promised “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
Here are key takeaways from Wednesday’s Trump Tower document dump:Trump’s team was willing to collude Democrats, still hoping for a smoking gun on collusion, will rejoice at the revelations that Trump’s team was willing to take dirt from the Russians, and were angry when the goods never came through. Trump Jr. famously said “I love it” when he was briefed ahead of time that the meeting could produce “incriminating” information about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton that could hurt her campaign.British publicist Rob Goldstone testified that Trump’s son-in-law appeared “agitated” and “infuriated” when the Russian lawyer leading the meeting instead rambled about Russian adoptions — and not anything connected to Clinton. Kushner asked her to “focus a bit more” and start over, Goldstone said.RELATED: The 31 most important, insightful and just plain odd lines from Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia testimonyAnd Goldstone himself said he thought he was bringing a “smoking gun” to the Trump team, even if he believed the meeting was a “bad idea.”That being said, there is no federal statute against “collusion.” And “attempted collusion” or “desire to collude” is even less likely put these members of Trump’s inner circle in significant legal jeopardy.They left empty-handedTrump’s allies on Capitol Hill can point to testimony from multiple attendees, including Kushner and Goldstone, that people walked out of the meeting feeling like it was a waste of everyone’s time.Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin said the Russian lawyer leading the meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was “disappointed” and “embarrassed” and felt like her efforts fell flat. Indeed, it appears that her pitch about Russian adoptions and overturning US sanctions went nowhere because Trump’s family members and campaign staff were expecting something much more actionable about Clinton.The House Intelligence Committee’s Republican report, which said it found no evidence of collusion, said the Trump Tower meeting was an “ill-advised” endeavor, but it didn’t amount to more than bad judgment.Of course, if there was some sort of corrupt exchange at the meeting, the key players involved would not likely willingly reveal that to congressional investigators.Key questions are still lingeringThere was tons of detail in the 2,500 pages of documents that the Senate Judiciary Committee released on Wednesday, but there are still key questions that haven’t been answered.Perhaps the biggest one: what President Donald Trump knew about the meeting and when he was told about it.Trump Jr. testified that he did not recall telling his father about the meeting, but Democrats have pointed to Trump Jr.’s phone records to argue they aren’t getting the full story from Trump’s son.In Trump Jr.’s interview, investigators pointed to phone records in which Trump Jr. had two calls from Emin Agalarov, the Russian pop star who helped arrange the Trump Tower meeting, with a call from a blocked number in between.“I have no idea,” Trump Jr. said when asked who had called. He also said he had no memory of the calls with Agalarov, and thought they might have been exchanging voice messages. Trump Jr. said he didn’t speak to his father about the statement, though he acknowledged some of his father’s comments to former White House aide Hope Hicks may have been included. “I believe some may have been, but this was an effort through lots of people, mostly counsel,” Trump Jr. said.There are other questions too, that the transcripts raise but don’t answer, including a discrepancy about how long Kushner was at the meeting as well as followup between the meeting participants — they had denied any followup but the transcripts are the latest piece of evidence to contradict that assertion.There’s still more pieces to the puzzleThe 2,500 pages of documents the Senate Judiciary Committee released Wednesday show a wide-ranging investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Trump Tower meeting, with lengthy interviews, text messages and other emails.But there are also avenues that weren’t investigated by the Senate Judiciary Committee. They did not interview Kushner or Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, and did not issue subpoenas for documents or testimony to Trump Jr., as Democrats had urged.RELATED: Documents show Trump lawyers’ scramble behind June 2016 meeting fallout“Let Mueller figure out what happened. I don’t know about phone calls, I don’t know who called who, that’s why we got Mueller,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is chairman of the subcommittee that conducted some of the Judiciary panel’s early work on Russia.The Senate Intelligence Committee has interviewed Kushner and Manafort, and they may have even more information about the Trump Tower meeting still locked in their panel’s secure Capitol Hill offices, as that investigation is ongoing.But Graham and other lawmakers say they believe it’s the special counsel investigation that has the best chance of getting to the bottom of the story.“What concerns me is for a politician to try to decide this,” Graham said. “I don’t know. I’m not interested in trying to figure it out. That’s what Mueller’s there for.”New insights, not bombshellsThere are many new nuggets to take away from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s transcripts, from Goldstone’s assertion he thought he had a “smoking gun” on Clinton to the description of Kushner being “infuriated” as the meeting wore on.But nothing in the new documents appears to change the course of the Russia investigations ongoing in the Senate Intelligence Committee and the special counsel’s office.In part, that’s because the existence of the meeting itself — which did not come for more than a year after it took place — was one of the most significant revelations that have been uncovered after the Russia probes got underway.